Stay on target

There’s more to Let’s Plays than watching some dude in the corner of the screen wearing a headset and mugging for the camera as he plays a first-person shooter/platformer/horror game (though if that’s your thing and you don’t want to watch a super-absurdly-gigantic YouTuber/Twitch streamer, my boy SomeGuyDude is excellent at that format). Putting more than one person on the mic changes the dynamic to something much more casual and conversational, and when those people have genuine knowledge and even a professional background in what they’re playing, it gets even better. And that’s just the start of why the Super Best Friends are among my favorite YouTube channels and an easy recommendation for anyone who likes watching games be played.

The Super Best Friends are Matt Kowalewski, Patrick Boivin, and Woolie Madden (along with former member Liam Allen-Miller, who since left to focus on his own streaming channel). They started off as just Matt and Pat as Two Best Friends Play on Machinima, and have since grown into the Super Best Friends Zaibatsu. They’re foul-mouthed Canadians who talk while playing video games on YouTube. There are a dozen little reasons their videos are consistently excellent, but no huge, throbbing killer bullet point to explain why. So let’s instead go down the list.

Professional Friends

To start, most of them are industry professionals. Matt, Woolie, and Liam were career QA testers for Ubisoft and Eidos’ Montreal branches. They understand the gunk of game development, because before the SBF took off they made their livings scraping that gunk out. Pat isn’t a former tester, but he’s still a psychotically obsessive gamer whose charmingly tragic self-deprecating humor makes him my favorite of the group. He is to the SBF what Rich Evans is to RedLetterMedia: His suffering is high comedy.

Besides the professional angle, they’re all pretty extreme gaming nerds. Matt, Pat, and Woolie all have some experience with the fighting game community, and Woolie in particular has competed in Evo and even, years ago, got his ass kicked by Daigo Umehara. They aren’t purely fighting game enthusiasts (though their Friday Night Fisticuffs/Saturday Morning Scrublords weekly videos highlight some truly bottom-of-the-barrel fighters), and instead of focus solely on that genre they hit character action games, adventure games, shooters, horror games, and platformers.

Let’s Plays are best when the games being played are either absolutely loved or completely hated by the player, and ultimately that’s the driving theme of the Super Best Friends. They’ll run through some really engaging, excellent games like Yakuza 0, Dark Souls, Night in the Woods, and Policenauts. They’ll also play through some absolute garbage like the works of David Cage (and their Sadness Tetralogy is must-watch gaming, culminating in a playthrough of Omikron: The Nomad Soul that almost destroyed them). Basically, whether they’re enjoying a game or suffering through it, the reason they’re playing it in the first place is because it has some connection or value to at least one of them.

Then there are the theme events. A few times a year, the channel runs a theme week or month like Rustlemania or Mechaweek. Next month is the sixth annual Shitstorm of Scariness, which has gone through some of the scariest and jankiest horror games out there (and I’m really excited to see the barrel-scraping they’ve done for this year).

Filth and Friendcast

There’s also the Super Best Friendcast, which I suggested for consideration in a list of PCMag’s favorite podcasts, but was vetoed as soon as the features editor read some of the podcast titles. Because they name their episodes some really dark, weird bullshit, like “The Burnt Shadow of HedgePreg,” “Push My Grandma onto a Microsoft Update,” and “Does Australian Horse Semen Taste Like Apples?” (the last one featuring Mr. Clemps, another interesting gaming personality whose YouTube analysis videos on the Drakengard and Nier series are excellent). And yeah, those names come from the warped things that come up in their discussions. Their conversational tone is equal parts hilariously esoteric, esoterically filthy, and filthily hilarious.

On top of all of the filth and gaming obsession, though, one of the big reasons I love SBF is how they’ve expanded my own geek horizons. Their videos and podcasts exposed me to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Berserk, the Yakuza series, Freedom Planet, and a dozen other weird, not-quite-big things I would have only been passingly aware of if their discussions didn’t pique my interest. A lot of my anime, gaming, and movie tastes have been informed by the stuff they talk about. I wouldn’t have even known about the otaku paradise that is Nakano Broadway in Tokyo if it wasn’t for Pat and Liam’s video showing off Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth. And Digimon Story is actually a really good not-quite-Persona game, too.

The Super Best Friends sits at the nexus of absolutely filthy, ridiculously esoteric, and surprisingly insightful. In any video, at any moment, they might be laughing their asses off at an animation bug, analyzing combat mechanics, getting grievously frustrated at awkward storytelling, or offhandedly mentioning some really weird fetish porn. It’s that kind of channel.

The Super Best Friends Extended Universe

While the Super Best Friends aren’t the biggest YouTube gaming group out there at around 600,000 subscribers, the tendrils of their zaibatsu extend surprisingly far. They’ve made guest appearances on Game Grumps and Maximilian Dood’s channels and streams, and have built a very enthusiastic following. They’re also responsible for a certain character appearing in a variety of indie games.

You know that weird biker-looking guy with lightning powers and monochrome Ultimate Warrior face paint who’s appeared in Shovel Knight and Divekick? That’s The Baz, and he’s a creation of Matt and Woolie. Back when Super Best Friends Play was called Two Best Friends Play and focused primarily on Matt and Pat, Matt and Woolie had a short-lived Machinima series called Fighterpedia. Their first episode showed some rejected Street Fighter designs, including an unnamed punk biker who appeared to be wearing Zubaz pants. They built on the idea of this ignored nothing of a character design and created The Baz, who got a surprising amount of groundswell (and will be appearing in the upcoming Pocket Rumble and Indivisible). I’m not saying I want to see him in more indie games. I’m saying I want to see him in the next Smash Bros. and in Amiibo form.

They’re also a great jumping off point for finding other, more theme-specific channels that offer really informative and entertaining videos, like the aforementioned MrClemps, Super Eyepatch Wolf, Mother’s Basement, and Austin Eruption. Also, the animator 2Snacks, who created their current Machinima opening, had made some really fun animation remixes turning Matt and Pat into Celestia and Luna in his 2 Sisters Play series.

Currently, the Super Best Friends put out two videos a day on their YouTube channel, and the Super Best Friendcast posted every Tuesday. The individual members also have their own side project YouTube and Twitch channels. Matt just finished a hilarious playthrough of Bible Black (yes, the one you’re thinking of) and occasionally posts Bug Report videos of action games he tested and how they break on MattMcMuscles. Woolie dives into fighting game mechanics and lore, and plays Naruto, on WoolieVersus. And Pat and his girlfriend Paige stream games like Dark Souls, XCOM 2, and Pillars of Eternity on their channels AngriestPat and PeachSaliva (and are simultaneously one of the cutest and literally least healthy couples on Twitch). Also, Pat and Paige’s friend Fuggins is a budding streamer and possibly the most adorably polite Canadian you’ve ever seen on Twitch.